Social sculpture and the right to the city: Ștefan Rusu’s artistic practice between modernist architecture and post-socialist public spaces
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52673/18570461.26.1-80.24Keywords:
Ștefan Rusu, social sculpture, right to the city, modernist architecture, post-socialist public spaces, socialist heritage, commons, commoningAbstract
This article examines Ștefan Rusu’s artistic practice through the relationship between social sculpture, modernist heritage, and the right to the city in the post-socialist context. The study focuses on projects such as “The Open Apartment”, “Endangered Species: A Plea for the Red Book of Modernist Architecture”, and “Seeds of Hope: activation, recovery, empowerment” transform socialist architecture and public space into a field of critical reflection, collective memory, and community action. Based on a theoretical framework integrates the contributions of Henri Lefebvre, Stavros Stavrides, David Harvey, Chantal Mouffe, and Joseph Beuys, the article shows that Ștefan Rusu’s interventions exceed the documentary or exhibition format and operate as practices of re-signifying the built heritage. Modernist architecture is interpreted as a living cultural habitat, vulnerable to decay, privatization, and oblivion, yet still capable of generating new forms of commoning, participation, and civic imagination. From this perspective, Ștefan Rusu’s practice can be understood as a form of social sculpture applied to the post-socialist city.
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